Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Annual progess

Today I spoke with Jay and he has completed the inspection. The good news is he didn't find anything super major... the bad news is he found lots of little stuff such as things that need to be lubed or repaired, some dry/brittle plastic pieces, etc. The biggest items were things such as the magnetos on the left engine have worn points and those need to be replaced. That was one of the items Paul found during the prebuy so I asked Jay to inspect the rest and see if we need to overhaul the whole mag. The scariest was he said he found some lead and metal in the right engine oil filter, not enough to ground the plane but enough such that he suggests I monitor it and get some oil analysis done on it moving forward. I was expecting at least a few years and a few hundred hours more out of the 1300 hour engines, it would suck to have to overhaul one right away... more expense, more downtime. There are some parts that are chaffing here and there, a section of something that needs to be stop drilled, etc, etc etc. I'll get the full list tomorrow as well as a cost/time estimate. I asked for a WAG (wild ass guess) as to the cost but Jay said he'd rather just work it out and give me a real estimate, but he did say he expects to have the plane ready to pickup mid next week. At this point I have no idea what to expect on cost, but I'm reasonably sure it ain't gonna be cheap!

As far as planning the return trip, it looks like weekend of Feb 20th is going to be the soonest weekend, although the Wx has been pretty abysmal back east for the last few weeks, and in my opinion the flight has not been doable. Most of it seems to be moving through and there is a big high building through the midwest right now however. Hopefully the timing will work out and the weather will cooperate, although its tough to say.